Photo Scanning Date Tip

If you've ever tried scanning old photographs and then managing them with modern software like Aperture or iPhoto, you know that date and time stamps can be a hassle. By default, a freshly scanned image will import into Aperture with the file's creation date (i.e. today's date), not the date the photo was taken. To remedy this situation, the free command line exiftool can be used with a command like the following:

exiftool "-dateTimeOriginal=1985:12:01 12:00:00-05:00" img036.jpg

The above example sets the date EXIF tag for img036.jpg to December 1st, 1985 (the time stamp is irrelevant). Even if you don't know the exact date the photo was taken, it's helpful to at least have the correct year in the EXIF tags. After setting the date, import into Aperture or iPhoto, and the photograph will be sorted correctly by date rather than appearing at the top with all your latest photos.

iPhone Web Sites

For all of you iPhoners out there, I thought I'd share a few of my favorite iPhone formatted web sites to enhance your holiday browsing and bring joy into your hearts. 

To begin with, although NetNewsWire is a great RSS feed reader for your Mac and has an online equivalent for your phone, the mobile version doesn't even compare to the new mobile Google Reader.   Google Reader has a stunningly well designed (and beautiful) iPhone interface which automatically keeps your reading list in sync wherever you read.  Read some news on your home computer, some more on your phone, and then even more at work (gasp) and Google Reader will seamlessly keep track of what you've read and what you haven't.   To view Reader on your iPhone, just go to the Google home page and click the reader button at the top; going to the normal reader link on your phone won't give you the mobile interface, so make sure to navigate there from www.google.com on your phone.

Another favorite when out and about is Amazon's iPhone interface.  Fairly well designed and handy for price or rating checking when browsing books at your local bookstore.  Great for making sure those bargain books are really worth it!  Just go to the normal Amazon site on your iPhone and it should auto-redirect you to the iPhone optimized page.

For mobile weather, Apple's built in weather widgets are great, but I often find myself wanting to see a real forecast with details rather than just a little sun or rain cloud with a temperature, don't you?  One of  my favorite weather sites, the Weather Underground, has finally made my dreams come true with their iPhone optimized weather site.  If you forget the URL, they have a little tiny link on the top of their normal website.  It's cool.  Seriously.  

Well, there you have it - three of my favorite little iPhone sites for getting your internet fix on the go.  Enjoy.

iPhone Number 2 Smartphone Already?

According to this article, the iPhone already holds 27% of the smart phone market share in North America and is second only to Blackberry!  Fairly impressive for a phone which is only six months old; just wait until developers get their hands on the iPhone SDK in February and all sorts of craziness will break loose.

The study looked at third quarter sales of smartphones and found that in its first full quarter, the iPhone has already outsold all of the Microsoft Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm phones and now holds a 27 percent market share in North America.

Holiday Season

It's the holiday season, and time to search for gifts for your hard to please friends and relatives. If you're considering purchasing a gift certificate from Amazon.com this year, and you buy it through this link , Chimoosoft will earn a small referral commission! What a great way to help out your favorite Mac software developer during the holidays!!

Amazon gift cards are a great idea simply because Amazon sells such a massive variety of products.  Books, music, movies, computer software and hardware, TV and stereo equipment, camera gear, etc.!  Free shipping on orders over $25, yada yada...

Hosting Issues

Finally got around to switching web hosting providers for Chimoosoft.com away from Yahoo.  Although Yahoo has been very reliable and hassle free over the years, there were several big drawbacks to it: FTP access only (no SFTP), an older version of PHP, no web statistics for PHP pages (even though they were supposed to be available), no SVN hosting, no Ruby on Rails support, no terminal access, etc..  

Our new hosting provider is Webfaction which has much more customizability and should help Chimoosoft.com evolve into a more fully featured site.  During the transition process, the domain temporarily pointed at nothing Sunday morning for a few hours; if you were directed to a temporary Go Daddy parking page, now you know why.  Email may also have bounced back to you, so please try sending it again.  Sorry for the trouble - note that this is Chimoosoft's first hosting provider change in about five years, so this doesn't happen too often!

If you're curious about Webfaction - so far, so good.  I'll post more information about the provider as time passes.  Go Daddy seems to have worked fine, but the site was incredibly confusing and poorly laid out (IMHO) - pretty much the opposite of Apple's clean design principles!

PS: If you get tempted by webfaction, signing up through this link will give Chimoosoft a bonus!

Cocoa Foot Dipping

In my ramblings about the internet today I came across Andy Matuschak's gentle introduction to Cocoa entitled "Getting Started with Cocoa: A Friendlier Approach."  I have to say I was fairly impressed with his friendlier approach and wished it was available all those years ago when I was first learning Cocoa.  To any of you out there considering diving in, why not get your feet wet with Andy's introduction?  What a perfect way to spend your holiday vacation time!

A quote from the article:

Now, don’t let this scare you, but I’m going to just come out and say it: Cocoa is huge. It consists of a great number of frameworks that can accomplish just about anything you need in application development. 

So any attempt to “learn Cocoa” is going to result in disappointment. We’ve just got to get you on your feet and show you how to find answers. We’ve got to give you a Cocoa intuition. I have no idea how to use Bonjour, for instance, but I’m sure I could use it in an app today if I wanted to. That’s what we’re aiming for.

Cocoa Delegates

I came across a couple of interesting articles about using delegates in Cocoa which may be of interest to those of you with some software design background.

• Delegating Authority - Cocoa Delegation and Notification (from stepwise)
• Extend with Delegates (from Cocoa Dev Central)

The way delegation is used in Cocoa is one of my favorite aspects of programming in this environment; subclass only when really necessary.

Addendum: This article from Apple is also of interest regarding delegates.

Apple Style Guidelines

It's encouraging to see that Apple has standard style guidelines which developers are supposed to apply to their software.  I came across this while reading through the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

The Apple Publications Style Guide covers style and usage issues, and is the key reference for how Apple uses language. This document is available in the User Experience Reference Library; consult it whenever you have a question about the preferred style of particular terms. For issues that aren’t covered in the Apple Publications Style Guide, Apple recommends three other works: The American Heritage Dictionary,The Chicago Manual of Style, and Words Into Type. When these books give conflicting rules, The Chicago Manual of Style takes precedence for questions of usage andThe American Heritage Dictionary for questions of spelling.

Flickr

The new Chimoosoft Flickr page is now active!  Head on over to view photos from the Apple 2007 World Wide Developer's Conference in San Francisco.

Apple Developer Humor

While coding today, I was playing around with NSAlert and created an alert with an empty message.  I was fairly amused to see the following logged to my console when running the alert.

-[NSAlert alertWithError:] called with nil NSError.  A generic error message will be displayed, but the user deserves better.

;-)

New Blog for Chimoosoft

I finally decided to create a Chimoosoft blog since it's much easier to post quick notes using blogging tools than editing HTML by hand and uploading it.  Old news articles from the main Chimoosoft site will be migrated to this blog, so entries appearing prior to this one are migrated entries.